Bitcoin consumes 111TWh annually, the power consumption of the Netherlands, and emits 62Mt of CO2 per year, the same as Belarus. It also yields 42kT of e-waste per year.
Each transaction produces 650kg of CO2, consumes 1160kWh of power (as much as 40 days consumption for the average American home) and produces 450g of e-waste (about the same as hucking your iPad into the garbage can each time you transact on-chain).
97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can - while about 60% of all the power consumed comes from oil, natural gas and coal. So whoever sold producers the offsets I assume you must be alluding to better have replanted the entire Amazon rainforest by now. (Quick spoiler, carbon offsets are also a scam, generally speaking).
To say you're going to need to get some sources is an understatement about as large at Bitcoin's environmental footprint.
You can find all this in [1] or you can just reverse it yourself from the specs of the latest AntMiner and the current hash rate. Some napkin math is all you need.
I'm honestly amazed people still believe something so trivially falsifiable, but with everything else going on in 2022...
> 97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can
This is a really disengenuous point. Mining works probabilistically, and mining pools payout based on smaller units of work that probably have some probability of finding a block for the pool. The fact that a block itself is a large parcel does not make the system less efficient.
The point is a centralized equivalent of bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. Heck a proof of stake bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. It’s a ridiculous system even Hal Finney thought was unsustainable 10 years ago.
Value judgement aside the question was “is it carbon neutral” and the answer is a resounding no.
That's an entirely different topic/point. I was responding to your ridiculous point that 97% of bitcoin miners never find a block. You didn't even try to defend that point.
What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
1) miners profit from energy surplus. They do not create new power plants. Nobody is firing up a new coal plant to mine bitcoin. That is absurd.
2) miners have incentives to find and use wasted energy. For ex, flare gas recycling. Which actually helps the environment.
3) miners can turn on/off at will, and produce energy loads on demand. Which means they balance out the energy grid. Especially from erratic energy sources like wind and solar. This is already being deployed in some states.
(1) They literally reopened a natural gas plant in New York, where were you? [1] the broader point is this fossil capacity can just be turned off if we stopped wasting it on a bitmask lottery. You don’t have to bring on new capacity to cause harm (although they are doing that too).
(2) burning flared methane is better than not but not flaring at all is best? There’s no such thing as stranded power, there’s only missing transmission infrastructure which is being incentivized not to come online through profitable waste at point of generation.
(3) raising the baseline usage level through waste then turning it off when there’s a brownout level crisis is just an asinine plan to manage load that costs everyone money. Active demand management is an actual solution. So is grid storage. Also, “some states” is Texas, famously the worst energy grid in the US, home of the blackout. Meanwhile New York is banning wasting fossil fuel energy on miners.
Anyways you seem to bring no data to the table other than a “nuh uh” and some obviously flawed apologism.
No word on the ewaste?
It appears to me you’re using the “facts u dislike” acronym expansion for FUD.
> Bitcoin consumes 111TWh annually, the power consumption of the Netherlands, and emits 62Mt of CO2 per year, the same as Belarus. It also yields 42kT of e-waste per year.
it only consumes as much as the complexity required to roll out new blocks. As its price goes down so does the energy required to find new blocks. It is not static.
I gave current numbers. Surprisingly (and obviously unfortunately) the price change hasn't had an impact on energy consumption commensurate with the drop. There's a lot that goes into it - for instance cost basis of power: theft of power, graft, corruption, etc. If you're able to steal the power then it doesn't matter much so long as you can afford new miners.
tl;dr: price per coin represents something of a bounding function on consumption of resources (including mining hardware and electricity) but it's not as tightly correlated as hoped.
My point though is the idea all that consumption has been papered over by what I assume is buying some offsets - and now it's magically carbon neutral - is silly and obviously wrong.
I suspect you're being intentionally obtuse, but it bears repeating that there are plenty of simple activities that are forbidden by policy, and it would be just silly to argue that there shouldn't be any.